Menu

Month: December 2008

Roosevelt's Brain Trust vs Obama's Brainiacs

by Steve Fraser

On a December day in 1932, with the country prostrate under the weight of the Great Depression, ex-president Calvin Coolidge — who had presided over the reckless stock market boom of the Jazz Age Twenties (and famously declaimed that "the business of America is business") — confided to a friend: "We are in a new era to which I do not belong." He punctuated those words, a few weeks later, by dying. A similar premonition grips the popular imagination today. A new era beckons. No person has been more responsible for arousing that expectation than President-elect Barack Obama. From beginning to end, his presidential campaign was born aloft by invocations of the "fierce urgency of now," by "change we can believe in," by "yes, we can!" and by the obvious significance of his race and generation. Not surprisingly then, as the gravity of the national economic calamity has become terrifyingly […]